According to a McKinsey survey, 89% of employees believe that psychological safety is vital for their workplace satisfaction and productivity. Without it, the workplace environment can quickly turn toxic.
Think about it—you’re working in an environment where your colleagues hesitate to share ideas or voice concerns, fearing backlash or ridicule. In such a scenario, creativity and innovation give way to anxiety and distrust, hampering individual growth and the entire team’s potential.
Psychological safety is the antidote to it all!
Let’s explore how to create psychological safety in your workplace and foster an environment where everyone feels secure contributing, collaborating, and thriving.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to provide general information on building psychological safety in the workplace. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
How to Build Psychological Safety at Work
- What Is Psychological Safety at Work?
- Steps to Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace
- Step-by-step guide to building psychological safety
- Strategies for maintaining psychological safety in remote work settings
- Incorporating the principle of trust in decision-making processes to foster psychological safety
- The influence of organizational culture on psychological safety
- The role of leadership and employees in ensuring psychological safety
- How ClickUp can enhance psychological safety in the work environment
- Build a Stronger and Safer Workplace With ClickUp
- Frequently Asked Questions
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Psychological Safety at Work?
Psychological safety at work is the belief that individuals can speak up, question things, and take risks without fear of negative consequences.
Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson defines it as:
This sense of trust and openness within a team or organization allows individuals to feel safe expressing their thoughts and ideas, even if they are different or potentially challenging.
Historically, businesses focused on improving productivity and efficiency, with not enough attention to employee well-being—a crucial mistake.
Nearly 24% of employees leave their jobs due to feelings of mistrust, while 25% question their organization’s ability to foster a safe work environment.
Prioritizing psychological health is a must for companies to create a positive and productive work environment. Google’s Project Aristotle, which studied the structure and dynamics of successful teams, identified psychological safety as one of the most critical factors for fostering an effective workspace.
This cannot be stressed enough—psychological safety is as important as physical safety and must be treated as such.
The importance of psychological safety in a workplace
Psychological safety promotes a healthy and productive workplace. When employees feel safe expressing themselves, they are more likely to:
- Be innovative: Psychological safety encourages individuals to think creatively and take risks, leading to new ideas and solutions
- Collaborate effectively: Psychologically safe teams are better able to work together, share knowledge, and solve problems
- Be engaged: Employees who feel valued and supported are more likely to be involved in their work and committed to the organization.
- Experience higher job satisfaction: A psychologically safe environment can lead to greater job satisfaction and lower turnover rates
Exploring the four stages of psychological safety
Dr. Timothy R. Clark developed a four-stage model to describe the evolution of psychological safety within teams.
Stage 1: Inclusion safety
Before they can feel safe contributing, employees must feel included, respected, and valued as team members. This can happen only if employers create a diverse and inclusive environment, promote open communication, and ensure equitable treatment.
Stage 2: Learner safety
Employees can move to the learner safety stage once they feel included.
Here, employees feel safe to learn, grow, and develop their skills without fear of judgment or failure. This requires a supportive and encouraging environment along with opportunities for learning and development.
Stage 3: Contributor safety
At this stage, employees feel safe contributing their ideas, knowledge, and skills without fear of being dismissed or ignored. This stage involves recognizing and appreciating contributions, encouraging collaboration, and empowering employees.
Stage 4: Challenger safety
Employees at this stage feel safe challenging the status quo, questioning assumptions, indulging in interpersonal risk-taking, and proposing new ideas. This requires a culture of innovation, experimentation, and tolerance for failure.
Emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in creating psychological safety. Individuals and leaders with high emotional intelligence can better empathize with others, manage their emotions, and communicate effectively.
Team dynamics also influence psychological safety. When team members feel connected and supported, they are more likely to trust each other and feel safe sharing their thoughts.
Building strong team relationships through activities like team-building exercises and encouraging a sense of camaraderie can contribute to a psychologically safe environment.
The adverse effects of a lack of psychological safety at work
The absence of psychological safety can have profound negative impacts on both individuals and organizations. When employees feel unsafe expressing themselves, it can lead to the following outcomes:
- Disengagement: Individuals may withdraw from team discussions and activities, leading to decreased morale and a significant drop in productivity
- Stifled creativity and innovation: Fear of challenging the status quo or proposing new ideas can suppress creativity, hindering the organization’s ability to innovate and adapt
- Chronic stress and anxiety: A toxic work environment can lead to heightened stress and workplace anxiety. Employees may feel trapped and unsupported, which can manifest in physical and mental health issues
- Burnout: Prolonged exposure to an unsupportive atmosphere can result in burnout, where employees become emotionally and physically exhausted, diminishing their overall effectiveness
- High attrition rates: Employees who feel undervalued and unsupported are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere, leading to increased turnover and the associated costs of recruitment and training
Summarize this article for me pleaseSteps to Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace
Research indicates that 17.5% of employees feel they cannot voice their thoughts in the workplace. To combat this, leaders must take proactive steps to cultivate a respectful and supportive environment.
Building trust within teams involves consistent actions that demonstrate respect, honesty, and transparency.
Here are some critical steps you can take to improve psychological safety in workspace:
Step-by-step guide to building psychological safety
Fostering psychological safety requires a multifaceted approach involving leadership and team-level actions. Here’s a step-by-step guide to do this:
1. Define and assess
Clearly articulate what psychological safety means within your organization and communicate it to all employees. Using employee engagement software, conduct a needs assessment to identify areas where there is a lack of psychological safety and where you can make improvements to foster it.
Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Form View to collect responses from your employees
2. Respond with empathy
As a leader, it’s essential to cultivate the skill of responding with empathy and to encourage your team to do the same.
For example, you’re a team leader at a tech company, and one of your team members is struggling with a personal issue that has caused missed deadlines and lower-quality output. A leader lacking empathy might respond by flagging the team member for their poor performance or threatening disciplinary action. However, this approach does little to foster psychological safety.
Instead, leading with empathy involves taking a different path. Rather than assuming the team member is simply lazy or unproductive, take the time to have an open and honest conversation with them. Understand their situation and needs, and work together to create an action plan for moving forward.
Letting your team know that you genuinely care about them, value their feelings and needs, and want to create a healthy, safe work environment is a powerful way to foster psychological safety within your teams.
3. Address conflicts and provide support
Deal with conflicts promptly and fairly to prevent them from escalating and damaging trust. When a disagreement arises between two employees on a project, the manager could facilitate a meeting to discuss the issue openly and respectfully. This helps prevent the conflict from escalating and damaging trust.
4. Continuously evaluate and improve
Measure psychological safety in your workplace by regularly monitoring the level of trust, openness, and support among employees. Gather insights by conducting surveys, employee feedback sessions, or anonymous assessments.
Use this data to identify areas for improvement and implement targeted interventions.
Strategies for maintaining psychological safety in remote work settings
Remote work arrangements have become increasingly common, presenting unique HR challenges for maintaining psychological safety. Here are some strategies to consider:
1. Prioritize open and transparent communication
Regular check-ins, active listening, and transparent decision-making can help you create a culture of openness and honesty.
You can schedule weekly team meetings to discuss projects, share updates, and address concerns. Leaders can model active listening by giving their full attention to employees and responding thoughtfully to their questions and comments.
All-hands meetings can be powerful tools for fostering open communication within a company. By providing a platform for transparent, free-flowing interactions, these meetings allow employees to feel connected to the company’s goals, understand the decision-making process, and see how their contributions fit into the broader picture. This transparency can help build trust and loyalty among employees.
2. Promote a culture of trust and respect
A culture of trust and respect is fundamental to psychological safety. Leaders can instill this by modeling vulnerability, providing respectful feedback, and recognizing and appreciating team members’ achievements.
As a leader, you can share your challenges and mistakes to demonstrate that it’s okay to make mistakes and learn from them. Establish guidelines for providing constructive feedback to create a safe and respectful environment. Recognizing and appreciating team members’ contributions can boost morale and foster a sense of belonging.
3. Encourage social connections and team building
Physical or Virtual team-building activities, social chats, and company-sponsored events can help to strengthen team bonds and reduce feelings of isolation.
To enhance employee bonding, you can organize virtual happy hours, trivia Fridays, or cooking classes. One hack is to create a dedicated channel on your communication platform for informal conversations, and sharing personal updates can help develop a sense of camaraderie.
4. Provide the necessary tools and support
Providing employees with the necessary tools and support is crucial for their success and well-being. This includes access to employee wellness software, training and development opportunities, and mental health resources.
5. Set clear expectations and boundaries
Establishing work-life boundaries and offering flexible work arrangements can reduce employee overload, prevent burnout, and promote a positive work-life balance.
You should provide clear work-hours guidelines, communication expectations, and deliverables. Also, encouraging employees to set healthy work-life boundaries can help to prevent burnout and maintain a positive work-life balance. Flexible work arrangements, such as flexible hours, can help accommodate individual needs and preferences.
Incorporating the principle of trust in decision-making processes to foster psychological safety
When employees trust their leaders and colleagues, they are more likely to feel safe expressing their thoughts and ideas.
One strategy for enhancing trust levels is to involve employees in decision-making. Before implementing organization-wide initiatives, consider surveying your employees to get their feedback.
Transparency and open information sharing also build trust. They can help prevent misunderstandings.
Further, employees are more likely to trust consistent and reliable leaders. Anytime you receive feedback and act on it, communicate how the employee feedback was transformed into an actionable strategy. You can use all-hands meetings as a platform to showcase such initiatives.
Managers across levels should avoid micromanagement and empower employees to take ownership of their work. This lets people know you trust their judgment and skills.
Finally, acknowledging and appreciating employees’ contributions goes a long way toward creating a positive work environment.
The influence of organizational culture on psychological safety
Organizational culture plays a significant role in shaping the psychological safety climate within a workplace.
- Organizations with open and inclusive cultures encourage employees to share their thoughts and ideas without fear of judgment or reprisal
- A culture that supports employees’ growth and development and empowers them to take initiative can foster a sense of psychological safety
- An organization that values openness, respect, and trust can foster psychological safety, while a culture that is hierarchical, rigid, or punitive can hinder it
- A culture that values respect, integrity, and ethical behavior can create a safe and trustworthy environment
- Organizations that are comfortable taking risks and learning from failures can create a more open and innovative culture, contributing to psychological safety
The role of leadership and employees in ensuring psychological safety
As a leader, you should demonstrate open and honest communication, actively listen to employees, and encourage others to do the same. By modeling psychological safety, you can create a culture where employees feel comfortable expressing themselves. This can be achieved by creating clear expectations for respectful behavior, open communication, and constructive feedback.
Employees can help create a positive, psychologically safe work environment by supporting and encouraging their colleagues. Empower your team members to speak up if they witness or experience negative behavior that undermines psychological safety at the workplace.
How ClickUp can enhance psychological safety in the work environment
ClickUp is a project management tool that can wear many hats. By providing a structured and transparent platform for communication, collaboration, and task management, the ClickUp HR Management System can help create a more open, supportive, and inclusive environment, contributing to psychological safety within your workplace.
Here’s how it helps:
- By enabling direct, accessible, and secure communication between employees, their managers, and HR personnel, you can keep communication lines open
- By tracking employee performance over time, you can notice sudden changes—a drop in productivity, repeated absenteeism—that might be indicative of employee dissatisfaction or unhappiness
- The platform also promotes efficient collaboration through features like leave management systems that streamline requests and approvals. When you take care of the basics efficiently, employees feel a sense of security
ClickUp also includes various tools designed to improve employee engagement, such as surveys and feedback mechanisms, which you can use to actively seek employee input and feedback concerning their perceptions of psychological safety.
Other features like ClickUp’s built-in AI assistant, ClickUp Brain, can help you craft these surveys based on your complete employee info repository, set them up, gather and process data, and then view insights through a variety of graphs and charts.
Create and assign tasks easily to foster cooperation and team spirit
Creating a strong sense of cooperation and team spirit is essential for a productive work environment. Members of a team must collaborate while working on their tasks.
You can use ClickUp Tasks to create and assign tasks efficiently. ClickUp Tasks can be customized and assigned to the relevant team members. It also allows team members to leave comments and clarify any queries directly within tasks and documents.
Creating tasks, viewing each other’s tasks, and collaborating on them is a smooth undertaking in ClickUp, fostering a sense of teamwork and transparency.
Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Clips to record your screen and demonstrate specific workflows quickly. This is especially useful for remote or distributed teams.
Adopt transparent and open communication
ClickUp’s collaboration suite—which includes features like ClickUp Chat, @mentions, and comment threads—allows for real-time communication and collaboration. This makes it easy for team members to share ideas, ask questions, and provide feedback easily.
It can also help teams work together more effectively within the context of specific tasks, improving productivity, reducing conflict, and improving morale.
Teams can use ClickUp Docs to edit documents collaboratively in real time, assign action items to individual owners as tasks, and convert text into trackable tasks to stay on top of ideas.
By connecting Docs and Tasks, teams can centralize their work in one location and create custom workflows to boost efficiency.
💡Pro Tip: HR managers can use Docs to develop and share policies, SOPs, and other important documents with the company.
Track project progress but also maintain work-life balance
Today’s teams are juggling multiple projects at once, which makes it important to have a centralized hub for monitoring progress. That’s where ClickUp Dashboards come in. Think of them as your command center for managing numerous employees and projects efficiently.
ClickUp Dashboards provide a real-time view of team activities and task progress, ensuring everyone stays aligned. By visualizing outcomes and insights, you can enhance collaboration and boost team morale.
If you want to track dependencies and manage priorities on a shared visual timeline, use ClickUp Gantt Charts.
Gantt charts empower team members by giving them a sense of control over their work. By understanding their role and responsibilities, and task dependencies within the project, team members can feel more empowered to make decisions and take initiative.
💡 Pro Tip: To help prevent burnout in your team, offer benefits that support mental well-being, such as free gym memberships, meditation app subscriptions, and counseling sessions.
Cater to diverse workflows for teams
Empowering your team with autonomy is fantastic, but it’s just as crucial to let them work in a way that suits them.
ClickUp Views and workflows provide a clear overview of tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines, reducing workplace anxiety due to ambiguity and uncertainty. Plus, it offers 15+ customizable views!
If you have remote employees or those who work asynchronously, the ClickUp Views feature provides them with a quick overview of their tasks at a glance. It offers multiple views, such as ClickUp Board view, ClickUp List, and ClickUp Calendar View, allowing teams to choose the view that best suits their workflow and preferences.
Use ClickUp to monitor workplace health and set up wellness initiatives
The ClickUp Employee Feedback Template is useful for gathering employee insights and promoting a psychologically safe work environment.
Here’s how this template is useful:
- Quick setup: Ready-to-use, customizable template for immediate feedback collection
- Sentiment tracking: Powerful visualizations to monitor employee sentiment over time
- Custom Fields: Capture diverse feedback using attributes like Company Culture and Role Clarity
- Multiple Views: Access responses through various configurations for efficient analysis. Access through All Respondents, Responses List, and Survey Views
- In-built project management tools: Utilize tagging, automation, and custom statuses to streamline tracking
Employee engagement is a key indicator of overall workplace well-being, revealing how connected and motivated your team feels. The ClickUp Employee Engagement Survey Template helps you track and improve employee motivation.
With this template, you can:
- Regularly survey employees to assess their engagement levels
- Manage detailed employee profiles and streamline onboarding processes
- Gather insightful performance reviews to enhance team dynamics
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuild a Stronger and Safer Workplace With ClickUp
When employees feel safe expressing themselves, they are more likely to be engaged, creative, and collaborative. A psychologically safe environment can lead to higher job satisfaction, lower employee attrition rates, and improved organizational performance.
By incorporating ClickUp into your workplace, you can take a significant step toward creating a psychologically safe environment.
ClickUp’s collaborative features are designed to support open communication, transparent workflows, recognition, feedback, and task management, all of which can help promote trust, collaboration, and a positive work culture.
Sign up for a free ClickUp account today.
Summarize this article for me pleaseFrequently Asked Questions
What is a lack of psychological safety at work?
Psychological safety in the workplace occurs when employees can express their thoughts, ask questions, raise concerns, or take risks (all within professional boundaries, of course) without fear of negative consequences. Lack of psychological safety at work can lead to a culture of fear, mistrust, and disengagement among employees.
What are unacceptable working conditions?
Unacceptable working conditions may include a variety of factors that negatively impact employee health, safety, or well-being. This can include the following:
- Hazardous environments: Exposure to dangerous substances, machinery, or conditions
- Unsafe practices: Lack of proper safety procedures or equipment
- Excessive workload: Overwhelming workload leads to stress and burnout
- A discriminatory or hostile work environment: Harassment, bullying, or discrimination
- Lack of psychological safety: A culture of fear, mistrust, or disengagement
What is an example of psychological safety?
An example of psychological safety is when employees feel comfortable sharing their concerns about a project without fear of reprimanding or ridiculing. This allows for open communication, problem-solving, and a positive work environment.
What is the definition of an unsafe work environment?
In an unsafe work environment, employees are exposed to hazards that could cause injury or illness. These hazards include physical hazards like faulty equipment, chemical exposure, ergonomic issues, and psychological dangers like excessive stress or a hostile work environment.
What is the OSHA definition of an unsafe act?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defines an unsafe act as any action or behavior that puts ourselves or others at risk of harm. These could include using improper tools, failing to wear proper personal protective equipment (PPE), working without appropriate authorization, failing to follow safety procedures, operating equipment improperly, making mistakes, or simply being distracted on the job.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
